the evolving mind

I sometimes refer to Florida as the “Sand Bar State.” While I like the conventional sand bars that rim the coast — they can provide nice breaks for surfing — I’m not terribly fond of the soil we have here.

Did I call it soil? It’s sand, as you can see in the above photo of a particularly bare spot in our backyard. Additionally, it is a very fine type of sand, “sugar sand.” Pour water on it and the water will pool on top. Before eventually seeping in.

Winter is the dry season in Florida. That’s why we get springtime wild fires. The new growth generated during the wet summer months dies back and non-irrigated yards and natural areas turn brown and brittle. Kick hard enough and you’ll make your way down to sand. The whole state is a massive sand bar sticking out into the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico.

Oh sure, Florida has many nice things about it. But the soil isn’t one of them.

Technorati Links: environment

While channel-flipping one evening I witnessed a preacher tell his audience, “You expect me to believe that a lizard crawled up out of the mud one day and evolved into a monkey and that monkey is my grandfather?!”

This is an example of a classic, low-brow argument. It sounds ridiculous — to me — therefore your position is false. In this case, the preacher portrayed evolutionary theory in an extra-ridiculous fashion so as to better help his congregation to come to the conclusion they had already pegged as the more desirable one. This strategy is otherwise known as the straw-man logical fallacy.

Of course, no one seriously believes that the mud spontaneously and instantaneously generated life. Nor that a monkey ever gave birth to a human being. There were likely hundreds of transitional forms.

I would not label the preacher’s argument as clever. But there are those educated individuals who do make some clever attacks on evolutionary theory specifically and the fully naturalistic worldview in general. In the coming days I will be making a series of posts addressing some of these more clever criticisms. I hope to show both how they are used and why they are flawed.

Technorati Links: critical thinking, education

Talk about bad science writing, check this out: Our Unconscious Brain Makes The Best Decisions Possible.

Does the unconscious brain exist on a higher plane of our spinal column? I wonder — was this piece of poor reporting intentionally penned in a manner to give New Agers a chubby in their over-extending-the-meaning-of-science-findings chakra?

The article starts off with this doozy of a statement:

Researchers at the University of Rochester have shown that the human brain—once thought to be a seriously flawed decision maker—is actually hard-wired to allow us to make the best decisions possible with the information we are given.

So all those folks at roulette tables in Las Vegas should leave the “red” or “black” decision up to their unconscious brain? What about the decision to even book a flight in the first place to that Mecca for the statistically-impaired? Should that decision be left to the unconscious brain as well? What about the decision on whether or not to have a second, third and fourth martini?

What the researchers did find is that most of their subjects were better at estimating a large-number solution to a question of “probabilistic distributions” when they viewed a brief selection of data versus much more data.

Pouget says a probabilistic decision-making system like this has several advantages. The most important is that it allows us to reach a reasonable decision in a reasonable amount of time.

And why didn’t the heading to an article discussing their finding reflect that idea? Instead, the title read, Our Unconscious Brain Makes The Best Decisions Possible.

Oh please.

Technorati Links: brain, critical thinking

Is it just me, or does an article title such as Beauty Is Truth In Mathematical Intuition: First Empirical Evidence, wave red flags in your mind?

Empirical evidence for mathematic intuitions containing a beautiful truth? Egads. Good luck delivering on that. Did the article? No.

The researchers behind the conclusion reviewed the literature prior to conducting their own study (good — but elementary, really) and they found

. . . that the common experience underlying both perceived beauty and judged truth is processing fluency, which is the experienced ease with which mental content is processed. Indeed, stimuli processed with greater ease elicit more positive affect and statements that participants can read more easily are more likely to be judged as being true.

And their new “empirical evidence” supported this.

So by beauty they really meant processing ease. Wouldn’t “Ease is Truth,” or even “Pleasure is Truth,” have been more accurate? Oh, wait, but in that case the writer(s) of the article wouldn’t have been able to resort to lazy, cliché-filled prose.

The finding did get me thinking, however. Do more complex solutions to questions cause a sort of cognitive discomfort? Is that why many religious folk find evolutionary theory so ugly? In order to educate people about the solid merit of an alternate explanation to their very simply and easy “god done it,” should we first open their eyes to the true complexity of the raw data? Should we also highlight the glaring faults in their own flaccid position? Would evolutionary theory then be more likely to be welcomed as something strong and reliable?

Technorati Links: critical thinking, evolution, perception

drawn overhead
a sheet of fast-moving clouds -
feeling off-balance

Technorati Links: poetry

This photo gives me goosebumps [source].

Is it fair to say that those who are threatened by science are (generally) clinging to an old worldview?

Technorati Links: education, NASA

Gender differences interest me.  And so this finding would naturally grab my attention:

Men tend to perform better than women at tasks that require rotating an object mentally, studies have indicated. Now, developmental psychologists at Pitzer College and UCLA have discovered that this type of spatial skill is present in infancy and can be found in boys as young as 5 months old.

Okay, that finding certainly didn’t come from out of left field, so to speak.  But detecting it that early in development certainly is news.  And I fully agree with the attitude of the researchers.

“We don’t know why men are better than women at this task or why boys are better than girls at this, but we do now know that this difference extends all the way back to 5 months of age,” Johnson said. “We have shown that this gender difference is present in a pre-verbal population, a population too young to have learned it from manual experience with objects or from extensive learning processes, although learning certainly could be involved.”

“We are interested in this question because the visual-spatial skills of male and female adults, on average, are different, and as developmentalists, we are interested in exploring the origins of these differences,” Moore said. “While we believe we have found a phenomenon worthy of additional study, good science entails a circumspect approach to our conclusions; it would not be prudent to draw particularly strong or wide-ranging conclusions from the results of this single study.”

What I do disagree with, however, is the wording of the title: Gender Gap In Spatial Skills Starts In Infancy, Psychologists Report.

Why not “gender difference”?  Doesn’t a gap, in terms of human cognitive development, imply a deficit, something to be fixed?  

When is a difference a gap?  When you want to close it.

Technorati Links: gender, science

Two weeks ago I committed blasphemy.  Or so some would say.  My transgression?  I posted a comic depicting Mohammad.  To me this is no crime for there is no victim, no deity to have its bones broken by the stones of my blog postings.  But there are those who take fables very seriously and even vow to break the real  bones of any individual who disrespects the content of their minds. To them I say: We live in a big world getting smaller, a world that holds a diverse array of thinkers and thoughts . . . and words and drawings used to express these. You and your ideas are not the center of the universe. Get used to it.  

It seems to me that it is the responsibility of religious moderates to infuse a more democratic worldview into their “mother church.”  Why?  Religion by nature tends to be very ingroup/outgroup.  We follow the right prophet and the right teachings and behave in the right ways.  They do not.  Thus, it is more likely that change will come from within.

Technorati Links: culture, politics

each one unique
the three windchimes motionless
all dead silent

Technorati Links: poetry

The above is an ocean triggerfish photographed in the Bahamas. When I look at it, it seems to me as if the fish’s dorsal and anterior/belly fins have almost been left behind. I wonder what advantage this backward shift in form may have provided the fish: swimming, feeding, mating, what? My guess is that because the fish feed in tight places on coral and mollusks [source], having recessed fins provides an advantage in terms of access to food.

Technorati Links: evolution, fish, snorkeling